Review - 'Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982' by Cho Nam-Joo

 

In Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, Jiyoung recently quit her job to care full time for her newborn daughter. But something is wrong, as she starts to take on the voices of other women, both alive and dead, in her life. What follows is the account of Jiyoung's life, all that led up to that moment, from the view of her psychiatrist. Through it, we see the systematic and casual misogyny and sexism that has shaped Jiyoung her entire life.

Reading this felt both shocking and familiar. I wish I could say this book surprised me, being from a different culture and a slightly different time, but it didn't. The things mentioned in here are all known to me, either from my own personal experiences or through current events. I think any female reader, no matter the background, will see similarities with their own life. That's what makes this book so powerful and also terribly discouraging.

I didn't rate this book higher because it doesn't feel like a properly fleshed-out story to me. Rather, the dispassionate and sparse prose, mixed in with the gender statics, felt more like a long article. A lot of events are told, rather than shown, since it's written as if the psychiatrist is summarizing Jiyoung's life instead of fully fleshing out all the events and details. Also, I'm not sure Jiyoung taking on other women's voices really worked for me as a plot device. It feels like it was glossed over pretty quickly in the beginning and not very well explained at the end.

Still, this book leaves a lot of food for thought. Jiyoung's culture was making strides in sexism and misogyny, and yet, is the attitude towards women all that different between Jiyoung's generation and her mother's? Yes, overt sexism is slowly being legislated away, but it's the casual misogyny of every day life that lingers: this expectation that women need to work more for the same opportunities, that they need to be smarter to be even seen as competent, that they need to sacrifice all in order to raise a family and contribute financially. For all the progress of the modern world, we are still so far from gender equality.

Readaroo Rating: 3 stars